rendered positively dazzling by the keen air and the glow of exercise;
and the face was much too full and blooming to suggest the shadowy and
ethereal.

When near Twenty-first Street she entered a fruit store and seemed in
search of some delicacy for an invalid. As her eye glanced around
among the fragrant tropical fruits that suggested lands in wide
contrast to the wintry scene without, she suddenly uttered a low
exclamation of delight, as she turned from them to old friends, all
the more welcome because so unexpected at that season. These were
nothing less than a dozen strawberries, in dainty baskets, decked out,
or more truly eked out, with a few green leaves. Three or four baskets
constituted the fruiterer's entire stock, and probably the entire
supply for the metropolis of America that day.

She had scarcely time to lift a basket and inhale its delicious aroma,
before the proprietor of the store was in bowing attendance, quite as
openly admiring her carnation cheeks as she the ruby fruit The man's
tongue was, however, more decorous than his eyes, and to her question
as to price he replied:

"_Only_ two dollars a basket, miss, and certainly they are beauties
for this season of the year. They are all I could get, and I don't
believe there is another strawberry in New York."

"I will take them all," was the brief, decisive answer, and from a
costly portemonnaie she threw down the price, a proceeding which the
man noted in agreeable surprise, again curiously scanning the fair
face as he made up the parcel with ostentatious zeal. But his customer
was unconscious, or, more truly, indifferent to his admiration, and